Analyzing and Visualizing Ariel Bombing Data During WW2

By Justin McKinney and Justin Ashbaugh

Step 1: The Dataset

The dataset we choose was a subset of the "Theater History of Operations", which is a dataset that tracks every ariel bombing mission recorded from WW1 to Vietnam. This particular data set contains records of mainly US and Royal Air Force mission who did the majority of the ariel bombing throughout the war. It is in a CSV format and in a few seprate files that contain tables of information about the various data. It can be found here.

A few things to note

Tidy the data

Lets drop some of those unecessary columns that we won't be using in order to make the data a bit more readable.

Step 2: Analysis

Now that we have loaded the data lets do some basic analysis! Lets see how many tons of bombs the allies dropped over the corse of the war. We can do this easily by specifying the column containing the total tons of weaponry dropped and calling sum on that column.

That is a pretty isane amount of weaponry dropped over the corse of WW2. Now lets try to recreate that graph on the website we got the data from that showed which countries had the most tons of weaponry dropped on them.

Wow! That is a lot of bombs dropped on Germany. Now lets now see who was dropping those bombs. We can do a similar strategey as the last graph except this time we will group by the country flying the mission instead of the target country.

The USA and Great Britan unsuprisingly did the most dropping of bombs. Now lets find which planes did most of this bomb dropping.

The B17 leads this category having dropped almost 30% of all bombs dropped by the US and Great Britan over the war. This is impressive but not unexpected as the B17 was one of the most mass produced and effictive bombers of the war. Britanica states that the B17 was "was the mainstay of the strategic bombing campaign" for the US.

Now lets try to get a nice overview of the amount of bombing that occured over time.

Step 3: More in depth visualization

Now lets bring in folium to do some visualizing of what areas were bombed the most. Folium will let us create an interactive heatmap in order to see what areas were most bombed by the allies throughout the war. For viewer convience we will lable the capital cities of the main Axis powers.